Schools ignore it - but is it time for the empire to strike back?

More than three decades since the last pink-tinged maps of the colonies were hauled down from classroom walls across Britain, the empire looks like striking back.

Leading historians addressing the Prince of Wales summer school for English and history specialists this week argued that Britain's imperial past has been ignored for too long, and should be reinstated at the core of the secondary school curriculum.

Professor Niall Ferguson, who recently presented Empire - How Britain Made the Modern World on Channel 4, described the subject as "the big story of British history in the modern period". Teaching British history without it, he said, is like "Hamlet without the prince".

The call for the empire to make a comeback in history lessons was a main theme of the prince's gathering, which saw writers and historians brought together in Dunston Hall hotel in Norwich, a venue normally associated with golf rather than intellectual endeavour.

The week saw poet Seamus Heaney rubbing shoulders with historian David Starkey, playwright Tom Stoppard lining up alongside detective writer PD James, and historian Simon Schama flying in from New York. Prince Charles himself briefly attended, arriving by helicopter to criticise the "fashionable ideas of experts and educationists" who, he claimed, have left many young people culturally disinherited.

The guests, nearly 100 teachers from schools in eastern England, heard Professor Schama speak on the importance of "visual literacy", citing Picasso's Guernica. Dr Starkey inveighed against leftwing views of historical inevitability, Mr Heaney made some well-publicised remarks about US rapper Eminem, while Antony Beevor, author of the bestseller Stalingrad, warned against Hollywood's glamourisation of death and war.

But the subject which gripped the con ference was how, in the view of several delegates, the story of the British empire has been airbrushed out of history.

Michael Wood, historian and TV presenter, said the empire was a cornerstone of Britain's "national narrative", a view endorsed by Scott Harrison, history adviser to Ofsted, who told the private audience that the empire deserved a much greater share of classroom time.

A previous Prince of Wales summer school, held at Dartington Hall in Devon, heard complaints that secondary school exam courses were dominated by Hitler, Stalin and Henry VIII, an argument which helped prompt the education secretary, Charles Clarke, into calling for a review of secondary school history last month.

St James's palace has denied reports that Prince Charles is mounting a personal campaign for the return of imperial or Commonwealth studies. But academic interest in the imperial past has been steadily growing, with or without his support. Books on the empire by Linda Colley and David Cannadine are judged to be at the cutting edge of historical debate. Prof Ferguson's television series attracted audiences averaging more than 2 million.

Many teachers remain uneasy at the prospect of dealing with such a potentially sensitive issue. One delegate told the conference that tales from the imperial past would mean nothing to the many Balkan refugee children she teaches.

Prof Ferguson, now at New York University's Stern School of Business, has attracted some criticism that his programme and the accompanying book were too favourable to the empire.

But he told the conference that studying the empire should not be "all Baden Powell" and that oppression and bloodshed would be covered, too. "It is also economic, social and political history," he said, which includes the Irish potato famine and post-war starvation in Bengal alongside Livingstone, Lutyens, and the Indian railways.

"It's been a real oddity that for two or three decades British history has been taught with the British empire largely ab sent," he said later. "We can teach the British empire without saying it's either a good or a bad thing. It was both good and bad. One simply needs to know about it - how it arose and how it declined. These questions aren't in any way politically loaded. There's an incredible hangover from the 60s left that says anything from the empire must be bad. I'm in no way pushing my own interpretation of empire. It's just that it should be at the core of what we teach people about modern British history."

History is only compulsory up to age 14 and, as Prof Ferguson acknowledged, many school departments are under pressure on their time. But he added: "To have people dropping history at age 14 after only one hour a week of the subject is an absolute scandal. A generation of young people has been disenfranchised. It's a real impoverishment."

Prof Ferguson accused university history departments, even at Oxford where he taught until last year, of reacting to national unease about the imperial legacy by deliberately ignoring the subject.

Scott Harrison, head of history for Ofsted, the school inspectors, said that the empire deserved a greater slice of school time. "We have school after school doing week after week of British social history and only one week on the empire. In terms of significance, that isn't enough."

Martin Roberts, author, history teacher and former head of the Cherwell School at Oxford who helped organise the summer school, said that the empire was often better understood by European students than at home. Historians in France, Germany and the Netherlands, he suggested, were astonished at its absence from the British curriculum.

"The argument of European history teachers was and is that if European imperialism was the most important world trend of the 19th century, and the British empire was the biggest and most important, why doesn't it figure more prominently in British syllabuses?"

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About this article

Schools ignore it - but is it time for the empire to strike back?

This article was published on
the Guardian website
at 03.57 EDT on Saturday 5 July 2003.
It was last modified at 03.57 EDT on Monday 7 July 2003.
It was first published at 03.57 EDT on Monday 7 July 2003.